The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘century’

I read something the other day that argued that Netflix has not a chance in hell of becoming “this century’s HBO.” Netflix may be popular, but don’t expect it to achieve the type of penetration and success of the cable channel.

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FIOS the first to get HBO Go

DocuSign, an e-signature service, has raised $2 million from Second Century Ventures. The venture firm is the investment fund of the National Association of Realtors. This brings DocuSign’s total funding up to $30 million.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign and service currently has 2.5 million users.

DocuSign is seeing increased traction of its technology in the commercial and residential real estate spaces. Rather than driving across town to get a signature or forcing their clients to find a fax machine, real estate professionals use DocuSign to execute agreements with buyers and sellers electronically, eliminating the old process of printing, faxing, and waiting for the return fax. In an age where deals are increasingly made remotely, it makes sense for e-signature technology to be adapted in the real estate world. The new funding will be used for further development of DocuSign’s technology for the real estate space. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:

Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios.

Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look.

Essentially, Xignite delivers a wide range of financial web services via the cloud, enabling browser and desktop application developers as well as online publishers to tap into a stream of critical market data on-demand in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. The data that can be pulled into applications ranges from market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information and analytics to detailed statistics.

Here’s what we wrote when Xignite and Forbes.com jointly announced how the latter was integrating the company’s data streams:

Google, CNBC, and WSJ pay the NASDAQ a sizable chunk of money for a single cumbersome stream of data. Now, Forbes.com joins the handful of consumer portals offering real-time data–with minimal development costs to integrate the raw NASDAQ or BATS data.

Rapid iteration is a major benefit of cloud-based systems, though forcing further reliance on your partner. Forbes.com simply embeds a widget on any page that needs stock quotes. The Achilles heel is that Forbes must now depend on Xignite for any widget changes. For a large company, this may not always be an easy decision. But for smaller companies, this gives them access to services previously reserved for the big boys.

Xignite is today announcing that it has signed up StockTwits, a community-powered micro-blogging information service that allows users to track information about public company stock performances.

Another new customer is Turing Studios, an iPhone application developer that is about to debut a realtime version of its PortfolioLive app, which tracks stock prices, values, options and futures. Last but not least, the company has won business from Palantir Technologies, a developer of an enterprise analytics platform called Palantir Finance that enables banks and hedge funds to integrate and analyze data sources.

As more and more data moves to the stream, Xignite is positioned well to turn itself in an essential building block for many financial Web and desktop application providers and online publishers. And it’s a great case study for the cloud, too.

Privately-held Xignite has to date raised a mere $5.5 million from Altos Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures, although a host of large companies and financial institutions are on their customer reference list, including Citi, GE Commercial Finance, Wells Fargo, ING, Marsh & McLennan, NetSuite, Starbucks, and Wendy’s.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It’s not the news of the century, but this little gadget from HP looks pretty useful.

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HP Calcpad calculates, hubs it up

These panoramas show the remains of MJ’s secret toy lair complete with C3-P0, Batman, and Darth Vader dolls along with some bikes, some Bruce Lee stuff, and a few lumpen Power Rangers. This is the detritus of an overgrown kid with attention disorder. It jumps from cool thing to cool thing and even includes an arcade dedicated to games that died at the turn of the century.

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Michael Jackson’s sad, sad toy barn

Thanks to the Internet, and a healthy disregard for copyright, you, too, can watch Cristiano Ronaldo’s presentation at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu today. Here’s how

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Thanks, Internet: Watch Cristiano Ronaldo’s Real Madrid presentation online for free

DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the same investors.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In case you own a netbook and miss watching your movies on it or burning data on DVD, there is now solution from Japan. A Tokyo-based company called Century has come up with a netbook stand that doubles as a DVD super multi drive [JP]. The Nippon-only device supports DVD±R/+RW (8x), DVD±R DL/-RW (6x), DVD-RAM (5x) and CD-R/-RW (24x).

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Good idea or not: Netbook stand with built-in DVD super-multi drive